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<h1><a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/25925092">every cork oak carries the mark of all my knives</a> by <a class='authorlink' href='https://archiveofourown.org/users/waferkya/pseuds/waferkya'>waferkya</a></h1>

<table class="full">

<tr><td><b>Category:</b></td><td>The Old Guard (Movie 2020)</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Genre:</b></td><td>Abduction, Character Study, Fluff and Hurt/Comfort, M/M, Mentions of Suicidal Thoughts, Nightmares, POV Nicky | Nicolò di Genova, Pre-Canon</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Language:</b></td><td>English</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Status:</b></td><td>Completed</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Published:</b></td><td>2020-08-16</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Updated:</b></td><td>2020-08-16</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Packaged:</b></td><td>2021-05-05 04:19:56</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Rating:</b></td><td>Teen And Up Audiences</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Warnings:</b></td><td>No Archive Warnings Apply</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Chapters:</b></td><td>1</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Words:</b></td><td>5,637</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Publisher:</b></td><td>archiveofourown.org</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Story URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/works/25925092</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Author URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/users/waferkya/pseuds/waferkya</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Summary:</b></td><td><div class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <i>Nicolo is a fucking idiot with a soft heart: it’s the dead of night and he sits at the small kitchen table, across from the man, sharing a bottle of strong wine and roll-up cigarettes and memories disguised as stories.</i>
</p>
<p>It's 1979. Nicky and Joe go undercover in a group of Sardinian bandits that make their living kidnapping wealthy people for ransom. Nicky is conflicted a lot, and lonely a lot, he makes a friend in the worst possible circumstances and feels all the feelings.</p>
            </div></td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Relationships:</b></td><td>Joe | Yusuf Al-Kaysani/Nicky | Nicolò di Genova</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Comments:</b></td><td>29</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Kudos:</b></td><td>183</td></tr>

</table>

<a name="section0001"><h2>every cork oak carries the mark of all my knives</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Author's Note:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
      <p>lemme give you a shred of historical context before we start with his piece of self-serving, two-handed wanking.</p>
<p>between the Sixties and the Eighties, Italy was fraught with social and political turmoil that often turned violent (the so-called “Years of Lead”).</p>
<p>during these tough and unstable times (and then all the way through the Nineties), a few groups of Sardinian bandits (“Anonima Sarda”) took it upon themselves to kidnap a bunch of people. in the summer of 1979, they targeted and abducted the prominent Genoese singer-songwriter Fabrizio De André and his wife Dori Ghezzi. the two were held in captivity until Christmas. this is the point in time and space where this story is set.</p>
<p>FINALLY, in 2018, a two-part tv movie inspired by De André’s life and kidnapping came out, with our dearest Marinelli playing the part of, you guessed it, Fabrizio De André. hence, my brain did the thing.</p>
    </blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    
<p></p><div><p>Nicolo staggers on the edge of a black-and-white dream he cannot pull into focus; he sees dust dancing in a blade of sunlight, a long, dark hallway twisting downwards, slippery and narrow, and smudged faces in the shadows. A man crying with his eyes pressed shut. Nicolo trusts the significance of the images running behind his eyelids, and they stay with him long enough to haunt him but not to let him explain, the shapes melting, every outline shifting.</p>
<p>This is nothing like dreaming of Andromache and Quyhn running wild and free through the steppe, ax and bow drawn without fear. Now, every night Nicolo shivers in his sleep with dread, in his mind a darkness and a silence as heavy and feverish as the nightmare of a man hanged from a tree, coming back to life in the snow only to die over and over and over again, utterly trapped.</p>
<p>It is a different time, and yet: misery tastes the same.</p>
<p>Nicolo jolts awake with a gasp, his eyes wet, fingers immediately grasping for the familiar weight of an arm that would normally tighten across his chest, except he’s alone in his cot, a handful of bandits scattered across the damp farmstead, none of them the one whose comfort he seeks.</p>
<p>Nicolo rubs the sleep and the nightmare away from his face, scratches at the spot under his jaw that hasn’t stopped itching ever since they set foot on this sorrowful, beautiful, Godless island, and goes outside without making a single sound.</p>
<p>The moon has been dead all week, but the Milky Way sits low and heavy on top of the mountain ridge, casting its cold kiss over skinny trees and angular rocks and the flat expanse of the lake down the valley.</p>
<p>The sudden bite of the cold makes Nicolo regret the sleep-thick, tepid stench of the farmstead, but it’s only for the brief moment it takes him to find a few shadows that are more solid than the others, one of them dearer to his heart than anything else in the world. Nicolo sighs, and quickly descends the steep-ish slope to where Yusuf — who gleefully goes by Zosepe now, after an incredibly ancient woman in the first village they stumbled upon insisted that that’s the only permissible pronunciation of the name Giuseppe, — is keeping watch in the dark with two other men.</p>
<p>The simple act of setting his gaze over Yusuf’s form is enough to push back the sour taste of bile in Nicolo’s mouth. Yusuf looks up to him, and the gentle smile that immediately curves his lips makes his eyes go warm and crinkled at the corners; Nicolo feels warmth spread all the way to his toes and marvels at the sensation, so crisp and sunlight-like even after almost nine hundred years.</p>
<p>He wants to touch the beautiful bow of Yusuf’s mouth with his own, surrender himself to his embrace and talk the rest of the night away, soft murmurs getting lost in the darkness, words meant for the two of them only; but this isn’t the time or the place. They have a mission, and as much as Nicolo despises it, as many nightmares as it may cause him, the mission comes first.</p>
<p>Nicolo and Zosepe are friends, who fled to this proud pebble in the middle of the Mediterranean out of disgust and despair at the state of the hypocritical mainland. It has taken them three months to win the favour of the bandits; another two before they earned a place in the action. They are trusted and loved now, and they can’t risk their cover. Yusuf’s moony smile is already too much of a giveaway, and if the others were here, Booker would scoff and smirk and drag attention to himself, and Andy would kick their asses into next week.</p>
<p>So, the most Nicolo can do is look and want and tremble, but not touch, not ever.</p>
<p>“Are you alright, my heart?” Yusuf asks in the soft, private lilts of Derija, an indulgence their Sardinian friends are often more than happy to forgive: every time the foreign syllables slip off his tongue, warm as honey, Yusuf is quick to widen his eyes in a perfectly convincing imitation of guilt, and oh-so-sweetly apologize for it. There is no soul, mortal or otherwise, that could hold a grudge against that. If anything, the bandits seem more troubled by the fact that Nicolo di Genova understands and speaks the language just as well.</p>
<p>“I’m fine,” Nicolo says in Italian, for their friends’ sake. “It’s just that it’s cold inside.”</p>
<p>Before Yusuf can move, one of the other two bandits — Omero, Nicolo thinks; it’s hard to tell them apart in the darkness, under the scarves and the hats and the beards — has already peeled one of his layers off his back, a striped jacket made thick with a sheep wool lining, and he’s offering it up to Nicolo, who takes it with a graceful nod.</p>
<p>“Thank you, brother,” he says, a little taken aback at the gesture, and slips the jacket on. Omero shrugs and settles back, his heavy brow turned to the land uncurling downhill.</p>
<p>Nicolo shares a look with Yusuf, whose smile has turned even more tender and knowing: <i>they love you, as they should</i>, he’s saying with his sparkling eyes. Nicolo fights the urge to shake his head and instead sits down on the icy ground, as close as he can to Yusuf, which is not even marginally close enough.</p>
<p>Nicolo looks over the mountain tops and out to the shimmering lake, trying to make sense of this night, of this mission. He can feel Yusuf’s heavy gaze on him, knows that his soul and his heart is studying the hardened line of his mouth, the deep dark circles under his eyes, and he feels his own chest constrict at the thought that he’s making Yusuf worry.</p>
<p>He can’t help it.</p>
<p><i>I don’t like this</i>, he wants to scream into the hollow expanse of air in front of him, <i>I don’t like any of this</i>, in the hopes that Andy will hear and understand and call this off, let them go somewhere warm and sunny, someplace where Nicolo can grab Yusuf’s hand at any moment and be alone with him under a starlit sky like this and kiss him full on the lips without a second thought.</p>
<p>He’s tired and aching and doesn’t understand the point of their being here. He wants to do good in the world, and he usually trusts Andy’s judgement about everything and anything, but this time, for the first time, all of her explanations have fallen flat and unconvincing to his ears. She has talked about the importance of the mission at length, unraveling her reasoning in the clipped, hard sentences she’s been using for centuries, ever since they lost Quyhn — ever since she lost her heart, — and it all felt perfectly sound and fair and absolutely fucking <i>mental</i>.</p>
<p>What good is there in consorting with a band of kidnappers, keeping watch even as they hold other human beings in captivity?</p>
<p><i>It’s only temporary</i>, Andy had said. <i>I need you two to infiltrate the group because something bigger is going on and we have to understand the connections before we act, and while you’re there, you can keep an eye on the victims</i>, and Nicolo gets it, on a rational level. But his heart is in a whole different place, and isn’t Yusuf always teasing that the brittle, pliable muscle will be the death of him?</p>
<p>Nicolo knows that he should harbor at least a modicum of pride about what he’s doing. In a few months, they’ve managed to talk the others into improving their guests’ living situation a good deal, and furthermore, he’s part of a plot to try and stop the bloodthirsty turmoil that’s shaking a country that, throughout the centuries, he has come to identify with his own home. The Genova of his childhood has crumbled and burned a thousand times over, but the country they’re looking after has a city with the same name, placed in roughly the same spot, with a few alleyways that look painfully familiar and just about the same rotten scent of sea and salt, and Nicolo is nothing if not a devout man, and he would break every bone in his body to lessen the pointless suffering of humans — and he has done as much, over and over, — but this mission sits like a hot coal in his throat.</p>
<p>He was talked into fighting an unjust war once before; he has sworn he would not make the same mistake again, and yet: here he is. Nicolo sighs, and in the quiet of the night it sounds unbearably loud and desperate.</p>
<p>Yusuf stretches his legs out, and his foot ends up tucked under Nicolo’s knee, where it’s pressed to the ground. Nicolo closes his eyes and focuses his every thought on that one point of contact, praying against all hope that it’ll be enough to keep him sane.</p>
<p></p><div class="center"><p>*</p></div>The man cries in his sleep every night. Quiet, soft sobs shake his skinny shoulders and his back as he curls in on himself and away from his wife, teeth chattering from the cold. It’s devastating. It’s unbearable.<p>Nicolo was promoted from sentry to jailer a week ago, and he hasn’t slept more than three hours a night since then. They moved to an abandoned farm further into the mountains, the walls and roof the same color of the rocks all around, all but invisible to a casual glance. He is all alone keeping watch because there’s a big, mysterious meeting in a few days and the bandits need to show off all the hands they have; Nicolo is trusted and quiet and intelligent, and also, he drew the short straw.</p>
<p>The guests are locked in a room with an actual bed and a heap of blankets, an adjoining bathroom and a pretty view of the backyard through the bars at the window, and every night Nicolo puts down his bedroll in the corner of the house that’s the furthest away from their door, and still he can hear the man’s wet intakes of breath, he can taste every choked-back moan of anguish.</p>
<p>Nicolo has never been able to fool himself properly. For all of Andy’s talk of a greater good, he knows he’s complicit in all of these two innocent people’s trauma and pain.</p>
<p>The nightmares have changed as well: instead of a dark descent into the underground, he’s now haunted by a scorching sun burning inside a house so big he could walk through it for forty days and never find the same room twice. The walls around him weep and point to him as the source of their pain. He’s alone and scared and trapped and wears heavy chains at his ankles.</p>
<p>Nicolo has a shotgun on him at all time and a few knives scattered around the house, tokens of affection and faith from Omero should something go wrong, and he has not considered putting them to use against himself, not yet — forget for a moment the terrible fact that death wouldn’t stick anyway — but. <i>But</i>.</p>
<p>He wishes he could speak to Booker.</p>
<p>His only relief comes at sunset, every other day: Yusuf is the one to bring them food and water and news from the rest of the group. He often stays for an hour or two, as long as he can before turning to the long journey back to base, and Nicolo’s bruised heart feels a little better around him, as it is wont to do, even if Yusuf’s beautiful face is always taut with a strange sort of concern.</p>
<p>It takes Nicolo an embarrassingly long time to realize that Yusuf is simply worried about him.</p>
<p>Nicolo brings bread and cheese and the best cut of stew to the captives, and he doesn’t take more than two steps into the room, he’s careful to keep his head bent low, he lingers in the shadow. He’s not afraid of being identified; but he knows he can’t handle meeting their eyes, the silent plea he’s certain he’ll find in them, the shiny veil of tears and rightful hate. They stopped begging to be released after the second week. They’ve been prisoners, away from their family, away from their children and their friends and their home, for four months.</p>
<p>It was summer when they were taken. It’s almost Christmas now.</p>
<p>Yusuf came alone tonight, which is not prudent but a blessing nonetheless. He takes Nicolo’s hand and pulls him to eat in the open, sitting under the pomegranate tree in the backyard, watching the sky turn a gorgeous gradient of orange and lilac and a deep, bottomless blue. Nicolo settles between Yusuf’s legs, leaning back in a weak imitation of their most preferred way to sleep, and if he closes his eyes, he can pretend for a moment that they’re out of here, sharing a bed instead of a hard patch of grass, with a stretch of days to be spent in love and pleasure in front of them, instead of trying to steer the course of history away from ruthless violence.</p>
<p>“We’ll be here just a few more days,” Yusuf says, his lips moving against the shell of Nicolo’s ear, his heartbeat steady and familiar at Nicolo’s back. “After the meeting, we’ll have answers for Andy, and we’ll go home.”</p>
<p>“I hate this,” Nicolo mumbles, his head lolling back to sit heavy on Yusuf’s shoulder. Yusuf’s arms tighten around him, their hands intertwined in Nicolo’s lap. “There’s so much land and mountains and nothingness all around, one forgets we’re on an island.”</p>
<p>Yusuf chuckles, a warm puff of air that makes Nicolo hum low in his throat and arch his back a little.</p>
<p>“We should come back in the summer,” Yusuf says, then drops a kiss to the side of Nicolo’s throat, and Nicolo feels himself flush. “This is a beautiful place, I think.”</p>
<p>“Maybe in a thousand years,” Nicolo says with a pout, switching to Derija without even realizing it. He can feel Yusuf’s lips curling up in a smile against his skin.</p>
<p>“Alright then, it’s a date.”</p>
<p>Nicolo scoffs, the words <i>incurable romantic</i> circling his head and his tongue.</p>
<p>“Are we taking good enough care of them, do you think?” he asks instead, half-lulled to sleep by the scent of Yusuf’s sweat and his body. Yusuf is very still for a moment, then he lets out a sigh and kisses the tip of Nicolo’s ear.</p>
<p>“I think so, yes,” he says, and although it’s clearly a lie, it still brings Nicolo a measure of comfort.</p>
<p>“I wish we could do more,” Nicolo insists, incapable of letting go.</p>
<p>“I know, my heart. I do, too. But we cannot,” Yusuf sighs. “They are healthy, and well-looked after, and this dreadful affair will soon be over. We are making sure of it.”</p>
<p>Nicolo disentangles one hand to reach back and stroke the soft peach fuzz at the nape of Yusuf’s neck. The forgiving trends of fashion of this decade have allowed Nicolo to grow his hair obscenely long, it goes past his shoulders and curls a little at the tips, and spending an entire summer drowning in sweat under the Sardinian sun, trying to win over the bandits’ trust, has lightened it a shade or two, so that it sometimes glows a honey-golden shade that leaves Yusuf breathless.</p>
<p>For himself, Yusuf went to the opposite extreme instead, shaving his head and his face after losing a bet with Booker and then keeping everything short for practicality’s sake; Nicolo still mourns the loss of his soft curls, but the rougher friction of fresh stubble against the delicate skin of his thighs is a force to be reckoned.</p>
<p>He spreads his legs a bit wider at the thought, and Yusuf hums delightedly under his breath. He moves his hand to Nicolo’s inner thigh, then, and starts thumbing at the seam of his jeans, moving upwards just a little, a tease, a promise, maybe even a proposal. Nicolo’s eyes roll back into his head.</p>
<p>He stirs in Yusuf’s embrace. They haven’t been together in a long time, another burden of the mission.</p>
<p>Nicolo is quite certain that the nightmares come to him easily because he’s weakened by his body and his mind craving for Yusuf, for his touch and his voice and his laugh. A fleeting hug and a few stolen kisses and even an hour spent sitting together like this do very little to heal the starving, gaping wound of Yusuf’s absence, and Nicolo knows this separation will soon be over, he knows it could be so, so much worse — he knows he must not think of Quynh and what losing her has done, is doing, to Andy — but this bitch of a mission is having him go mad.</p>
<p>“Stay the night,” Nicolo murmurs, turning his head just so, brushing his nose against Yusuf’s cheek and delighting in the small shiver that runs down the entire length of his lover’s body.</p>
<p>“I want nothing more,” Yusuf says, his eyes slipping closed, his hands giving up on their interesting journey and moving up to hold onto Nicolo’s hips, hard enough to leave a bruise that’ll be gone in a matter of moments. “But it wouldn’t be wise—”</p>
<p>“I know.”</p>
<p>Yusuf grins, “You ask only to torture me, then?”</p>
<p>Nicolo cups the side of Yusuf’s face and strains his neck to rest their foreheads together. “Always.”</p>
<p>“You are a menace. But I have not yet given up on the purpose of making an honest man out of you.”</p>
<p>Nicolo does nothing to conceal the small smile that takes possession of his face. Yusuf kisses him then, finally, <i>finally</i>, and as he opens his mouth to turn the kiss hungry and urgent, Nicolo escapes his nightmares, he escapes this island and the guilt and the damning memory of the man’s terrible, terrible tears.</p>
<p>They come up for air after a century or so, and Nicolo doesn’t know when he turned around to straddle Yusuf’s thighs, but he’s holding his beloved’s face in his hands and it makes his heart flutter like it’s the first time he’s ever touched him. Yusuf’s lips are shiny and begging to be kissed again and again and again, and Nicolo bows his head as if in prayer, and obeys.</p>
<p>It’s already dark when Yusuf reluctantly bids him goodbye; Nicolo sees his resolve to go back shudder and tremble, but Yusuf is right, they cannot afford a mistake right now, so it’s Nicolo that encourages him to go now, as much as it’s the last thing he wants in the world.</p>
<p>Yusuf lingers a minute more, untangling a bracelet of prayer beads from his wrist and then pressing it into Nicolo’s hand, still warm from where it was wrapped against Yusuf’s skin. Nicolo is left speechless, his infinite love for this man growing even more, his heart expanding under his ribs to the point where there’s no more space for air.</p>
<p>“Are you sure?” he asks, running his thumb over the misbaḥah’s round pebbles reverently, and Yusuf’s answer is as simple as a kiss, as easy as breathing.</p>
<p>“Will you think of me?” Yusuf pleads with such tenderness, his eyes liquid and shiny, and Nicolo is reminded that his heart needs comfort as well; he’s not alone in this, ever.</p>
<p>“I do not know how to stop,” he whispers, and it must’ve been the right thing to say, because Yusuf breaks into a smile that’s brighter than the sun.</p>
<p>“Just a few more days,” he promises, and the warmth of his kiss lingers on Nicolo’s lips long after he’s disappeared down the mountain.</p>
<p></p><div class="center"><p>*</p></div>The sky is clear and blue and luminous enough to hurt, but a flock of gray, frayed clouds is coming up from the valley. Nicolo studies them for a while, worried because a downpour will keep Yusuf from making the trip over tonight, then he goes to pick up the dirty dishes and empty cans from the prisoners’ lunch, quick and efficient and inoffensive as ever. The man sits on the bed and barely spares him a glance, but the woman stands abruptly and, with her ankles chained to one another, wobbles a few awkward steps towards him with intent.<p>“Can you take us out?” she asks, and it’s the first words she’s ever spoken to him. “It’s a nice day, isn’t it? Just… half an hour. We don’t have to go far. Please.”</p>
<p>Nicolo should just shake his head and go away and leave it at that. But there’s a strange tension in the woman’s voice, in her shoulders, something different about her than the usual, and it unnerves him.</p>
<p>“Quand e nûvie van a-o monte, piggia o caban e vatti a sconde,” he says instead, the old proverb tumbling out of his mouth before he can think about it. <i>When the clouds come up the mountain, grab your coat and go hide.</i></p>
<p>He shouldn’t have said that. He shouldn’t have spoken at all. The woman seems surprised, but the man — oh, the man looks downright devastated, his pale face turning even whiter, eyes wide and disbelieving, a slight tremor to his clenched fists.</p>
<p>“Ti t’ê zeneise?” he asks, an undercurrent of rage in his voice: <i>are you from Genova?</i> Nicolo freezes, caught in his mistake. The man laughs, a bitter and ugly sound. “This is great.”</p>
<p>“Where from? He’s from Pegli originally, but over the years we’ve lived all over the city,” the woman says, with a strange urgency and a brittle smile. What, is she hoping to trade tips about restaurants and cozy spots to go drink undisturbed? Nicolo is confused. She doesn’t strike him as stupid, and this pitiful attempt at a conversation makes no sense.</p>
<p>And then, he gets it. It’s the tiny, anguished looks she steals at her husband, that give her away. Nicolo knows, deep in his bones, what a worried lover looks like. And he knows the look on the man’s face just as well: he has seen it countless times, on Andy, on Booker. It’s a look of exhaustion, of complete and utter defeat.</p>
<p>They’ve been locked in here for so long.</p>
<p>Just as something ugly and sticky and wet crawls its way up his throat and to the back of his eyes, Nicolo looks at the dirty dishes in his hands and realizes that the can of beans is missing its lid. Its very, very sharp lid. A perfect makeshift razor, eager to be pushed to the plump, fragile skin at the inside of a wrist.</p>
<p>Nicolo bites his lips into a tight line, lets his heart break, and leaves the room. The woman calls after him but he locks the door and leans against it, the dishes clattering to the floor.</p>
<p>He can’t breathe for a full minute. He puts his mouth to Yusuf’s bracelet, begging for guidance, for help, and as always, no matter the distance, Yusuf comes to his aid.</p>
<p>Nicolo all but stumbles to his pack, an old, ratty thing that has followed him through a continent and a half in the span of two decades, and hidden at the bottom he finds a gift from a lifetime ago, battered and bruised, but one solid piece of metal.</p>
<p>He walks back into the prisoners’ room, carrying a chair with him. The woman seems immensely relieved to see him, the man doesn’t look away from the window. Nicolo sits and pulls a small, ancient harmonica from his pocket.</p>
<p>He hesitates and looks at the woman. She seems to understand his intent, but she still looks dubious. Unfortunately, Nicolo doesn’t have much else to offer.</p>
<p>He brings the harmonica to his lips and plays a tentative note — it comes out pitiful and quivering, but it’s the tone he wanted at least — then another, with more conviction, and before he knows it, muscle memory takes over and the room is filled with the first few bars to a Lucio Dalla song.</p>
<p>It startles a wet, surprised laugh out of the woman, and Nicolo smirks, still playing. He realizes the irony of his choice, it’s like trying to raise Stravinsky’s spirits by playing Prokofiev, but he couldn’t resist. This is one of Yusuf’s favorites, the tale of a young woman falling for a handsome seaman who doesn’t even speak her language but knows how to love her. The first time they heard it, Yusuf chuckled so, so beautifully.</p>
<p>“My ears are bleeding,” the man says, and his voice is flat but Nicolo sees the hunger in his eyes where he’s watching the harmonica.</p>
<p>“Sorry,” Nicolo says with a smirk, even though he knows he didn’t do that much of a bad job. He offers the harmonica and the man snags it from his hand, lightning-quick, making it disappear in his worn pants’ pocket before Nicolo can change his mind and take it back.</p>
<p>They stare at each other for a moment, Nicolo’s arm still up in the air.</p>
<p>Then, Nicolo calls himself an idiot and moves to leave them alone. A small, stupid part of him half-hoped that the man would start playing immediately, enchant him with a song. It’s insane to feel disappointment: he’s still a prisoner, he owes Nicolo nothing. The tense line of his shoulder curves a little bit, and that’s enough.</p>
<p>“Wait,” the man says, his voice barely over a whisper, but still Nicolo freezes mid-step. “Tell us something. Anything.”</p>
<p>Nicolo is startled at the grief in his own voice when he hears himself say, “I really can’t—”</p>
<p>“No, not about this. God forbid, no,” the man says, now with a modicum of force. “Tell a story. Make something up. Take us out of here.”</p>
<p>Nicolo hesitates, his heart shrinking two sizes. He doesn’t have a way with words like Yusuf does. He’s precisely the worst possible person for this, but there’s no one else.</p>
<p>“Please,” the woman says, and Nicolo’s heart expands again. He has nine centuries worth of stories. He sits down and rubs at the itching spot under his jaw.</p>
<p>“I read a book about the American-Indian wars, a few years back,” he says, and already he can taste the dust of Colorado on his tongue, he can hear the river roll gently, its water red and heavy with corpses after the massacre.</p>
<p>Nicolo sighs, and tells that story.</p>
<p></p><div class="center"><p>*</p></div>Nicolo is a fucking idiot with a soft heart: it’s the dead of night and he sits at the small kitchen table, across from the man, sharing a bottle of strong wine and roll-up cigarettes and memories disguised as stories.<p>Slipping in and out of languages, in and out of time, he talks about old friends who are now little more than dust but in his mind have faces and voices and smiles as sharp as blades; he tells funny stories about times he had half-forgotten; and time and time again he comes back to speak of Genova, the many faces he’s seen of her over the centuries. And he talks, in an oblique and most intricate way, about himself and Yusuf and the miracle of being found.</p>
<p>Fabrizio — and it’s Fabrizio now, quiet, clever, beautiful poet Fabrizio, even though he’s no less a prisoner than he was this morning — has laugh lines around his eyes and a sharp wit, but if the strange variety of Nicolo’s anecdotes and dialects seems suspicious to him, he never mentions it. He loves the stories about seamen and whores most of all; Nicolo sends a silent apology to Yusuf or Andy or Quynh every time he bends the truth a little just to make the man laugh in disbelief or catch him off-guard.</p>
<p>They’ve been at it for hours. Nicolo doesn’t mind it, he could go on until dawn and beyond.</p>
<p>Fabrizio takes a drink from the one glass they’ve been passing between them and says, “The man that was here the other day. Tell me about him.”</p>
<p>Nicolo freezes. All night he’s been toying with Yusuf’s praying beads around his wrist, and only now he realizes it. In the same breath, he realizes that the window in the bedroom has a clear view of the pomegranate tree where he kissed Yusuf when he was here.</p>
<p>Fabrizio is smirking, a faint and gentle thing. Nicolo’s heart pummels his ribcage, trying to get out.</p>
<p>“I… wouldn’t know how to do him justice,” he settles for, eventually. Fabrizio bows his head with a grace that shouldn’t be possible after four months of captivity, and yet.</p>
<p>“Does he pray?” he asks.</p>
<p>“Yes.”</p>
<p>“Do you?”</p>
<p>Nicolo fidgets with the bracelet a bit more. “I’m not sure,” he answers eventually, and it’s the most sincere he can be about his relationship to God.</p>
<p>Fabrizio smiles to himself, like he understands. He puts the harmonica to his mouth, and plays a few notes that Nicolo knows all too well. A smile blossoms on his face, and he closes his eyes, hums along under his breath, running through the words of the song in his mind and thinking of black curls, eyes of a forest, the simple, all-encompassing warmth of love and the breathtaking anguish of loss.</p>
<p>He cries, and feels no shame for it.</p>
<p>When Fabrizio stops playing, Nicolo wipes his own tears in the hollow of his hand and says, not unkindly: “There’s cruelty, in the beauty of your words.”</p>
<p>Fabrizio lowers his eyes and his cheeks redden, but it must be the wine. He stands, his chair scraping against the rough floor, and nods to the bedroom. Nicolo smiles his good night.</p>
<p>Before going, Fabrizio fishes the sharp piece of metal from the can out of his pocket, and leaves it on the table. Nicolo meets his eyes, and in his throat are stuck so many words of guilt and sorrow, infinite pleads for forgiveness and inexplicable truths, he can’t breathe. He can’t get any of them out. </p>
<p>Fabrizio goes to sleep, his head bent, Yusuf’s harmonica in his hand.</p>
<p></p><div class="center"><p>*</p></div>The next morning, the order comes: the guests will be free before nightfall.<div class="center"><p>*</p></div>It’s a few years later, and they’re between missions and Nicky is cooking dinner for four in a safehouse in the outskirts of Berlin, when Booker drops a large, square paper bag on the kitchen counter, a smirk curling his lips. For once, his breath doesn’t smell like a distillery.<p>“It was a pain in the ass, finding them,” he says in Italian, then leans in to steal a bite of the raw beef Nicky is mixing with soaked bread and garlic and eggs and spices to make polpette, therefore Nicky really has to swat his hand away with a wooden spoon like a dork, and they laugh together for a second.</p>
<p>Nicky wipes his hands clean and grabs the bag, raising an eyebrow. Booker pretends to zip his mouth shut and cocks his hip against the counter, arms crossed, expectantly.</p>
<p>“I forget the occasion,” Nicky says, but his voice dies when he takes one look at the gift Booker has brought him: it’s two records, heavy and beautiful, the first with a sunny painting of a Native American on horseback on the cover, the other with a house with a tiny slit of a window, the wall yellow against a clear blue sky.</p>
<p>Nicky’s eyes are suddenly wet.</p>
<p>“Shit, Nicky, I—” Booker says, sounding panicked and worried, and Nicky wants to comfort him, reassure him he did nothing wrong, but he has forgotten every word he’s ever learned in every language he speaks. He cups the side of Booker’s face for a second, then he turns away from the kitchen, heart in his ears, dinner forgotten, and all but runs to the living room.</p>
<p>Joe is sprawled on the sofa, his favourite sketchbook propped against his knee, fingers dusted black with charcoal, and raises his eyebrows at the frantic way Nicky throws himself at the turntable.</p>
<p>Nicky’s hands are trembling, but still he handles the vinyl with the devout care he reserves for precious books and cooking food for his family and Joe’s body. He turns the volume louder than what he would usually prefer, because he still hasn’t decided whether this is penance or grace.</p>
<p>The first song is introduced by the ringing of a single gunshot and far-away shouts and already Nicky is overwhelmed. His knees are weak, his feet take him to the sofa before he can think about it. He drops down and relaxes minutely only when Joe, ever so careful, puts an arm around his shoulders and presses a small kiss to his temple, understanding.</p>
<p>Every song carries an echo of a conversation long gone that knocks the air out of Nicky’s chest; he’d just about forgotten that unfortunate half year in Sardinia, put that wreck of a mission out of his head, fought back the nightmares, buried the guilt deep, carried on with his life, carried on doing good, and how spiteful of him, how arrogant, to absolve himself of his crimes—</p>
<p>Then the smoke and honey of Fabrizio’s voice sings, “<i>O, bandit without moon, without stars and without luck, tonight you’ll go to sleep with her rosary wrapped tight around your shotgun,</i>” and Nicky realizes he’s crying only when he tastes salt and water on his lip.</p>
<p>Joe’s arm around his shoulders tightens a little, Nicky notices the displeased tilt of his mouth.</p>
<p>“It was not a rosary,” he says, then winks, amused at his own wit, but his eyes are shining with tears too, and Nicky laughs, wet and surprised and sad beyond himself.</p>
<p>He buries his nose in the crook of Joe’s neck, and the music is wonderful, the words so fucking beautiful and cruel, and in a way, he feels forgiven.<br/></p></div>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Author's Note:</b><blockquote class="userstuff"><p>HOW THE FUCK HAVE YOU MADE IT ALL THE WAY HERE TO THE END oh my god thanks</p>
<p>OKAY A COUPLE THINGS MORE you might need if you’re not italian/obsessive as i am:</p>
<p>the song De André plays on the harmonica that makes Nicky cry is “Andrea”, (<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3Xqilt87frc">listen here and WEEP</a>, and <a href="http://deandretranslated.blogspot.com/2014/08/rimini.html">here’s a translation</a>) which is about a kid who’s suicidal because he was in love with a soldier with “black curls”, who died in the war. CAN YOU SEE THE SIMILARITIES. yeah. i blame Angela 200% for this, it was NOT in my outline for the story but then she came and made me cry inside. so.</p>
<p>(i don’t outline my stories. i don’t, and it shows. i don’t know why i said that.)</p>
<p>also, De André and Dori Ghezzi’s actual captivity was pretty, pretty worse than what i’ve chosen to depict in this story. BUT i made the historical inaccuracy a plot point? like, Nicky and Joe went to Sardinia specifically to soften the methods of the kidnappers, watch over the victims and try to unearth any bigger conspiracy, so in this universe Faber and Dori get a cozy little farm in the mountains instead of, huh, the actual <i>camping tents</i> they actually lived in for <i>months</i> in the bitter cold. don’t hate me from the afterlife Faber please.</p>
<p>oh and the thing about De André saving a tin lid “just in case” is… not made up. at all.</p>
<p>RE: the two records that Booker gives to Nicky, they are “Indiano” and “Creuza de mä”, released 1981 and 1984 respectively. the traumatic experience of the abduction inspired a song and, somewhat, the general concept of “Indiano”, which draws a staggeringly sensitive parallelism between the processes of colonization suffered by both the Sardinian and Native-American peoples. (i know, wtf? your faves could never.) specifically, there’s a song about the Sand Creek massacre which is what Nicky starts blabbering about in this fic.<br/>“Creuza de mä” is entirely sung in Genoese and it features an insane range of weird stories (like, Arabic prostitutes? check. 1500s politics? check. old, weird genoese traditions about sex workers strolling through the city on Sunday morning? CHECK) and yes i am implying that Nicky told Faber all those stories and that meeting a fellow Genoese pushed Faber to reconsider his life choices and write a masterpiece in his dialect. yes.</p>
<p>the song that Nicky plays on the harmonica is “4/3/43” by Lucio Dalla, <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3C5fVNlWXrk">here’s a link</a>. i have no anecdotes about this. i just put it in there for the Stravinsky/Prokofiev joke. also i butchered the explanation of the song; the thing with the girl and the hot seaman speaking a different language (YES YES JOE AND NICKY YES) is only in the first verse, the rest of the song goes in a completely different direction. Dalla was WILD, man. everybody should love him.</p>
<p>oh and in case anyone’s interested in a visual for how i’ve imagined their 70s looks, <a href="https://media.gettyimages.com/photos/luca-marinelli-attends-tutti-i-santi-giorni-photocall-on-october-8-picture-id153655208?s=594x594&amp;w=125">this is nicky</a> and <a href="https://img2.looper.com/img/gallery/why-joe-from-the-old-guard-looks-so-familiar/marwan-kenzari-is-a-well-known-dutch-actor-1589315435.jpg">this is joe</a>.</p>
<p>title: “Canto del Servo Pastore” (Song of the Servant Shepherd), De André</p>
<p>THANK YOU FOR COMING TO MY TED TALK i’ll take my crazy somewhere else now.</p></blockquote></div></div>
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